Talking Up Scotland

by Rab Bruce’s Spider

 

Mastodon: @RabBrucesSpider1@Mastodon.Scot

BlueSky: @RabBrucesSpider.Bsky.Social

X / Twitter: @RabBrucesSpider

 

The UK media in Scotland, aided and abetted by Unionist MSPs and a plethora of Freedom of Information requests, has been indulging in an orgy of attacks on Scotland, the aim to paint the Scottish Government as incompetent and failing, clearly hoping to distract us from the incompetence and failures of the Westminster Government. While I fully recognise the faults of the current Scottish Government, the media barrage has been quite ridiculous. We’ve had bad news on a range of topics but, as usual, our compliant media never bothers to check or investigate what they are being told by their Unionist accomplices.

 

It has been largely left to the excellent Professor John Robertson to do the work a proper journalist would do and provide some context, and what a sterling job he has done, demonstrating that most of the gleeful headlines are misleading at best.

 

So we’ve had reports of the dreadful number of newborn children who are dependent on drugs. Now, even one child born with drug dependency is one too many, but what the media did not report was that the number is actually falling, albeit not as quickly as anyone except a Unionist politician or journalist would like.

 

Then there were, as so often, ferries, with an apparently outrageous amount of money being spent on maintenance costs. At face value, the amount did seem large, but some excellent investigative work by Prof Robertson compared it to a Canadian ferry operator who spent more money maintaining their smaller fleet of older vessels. You’d think a proper journalist might have been able to do the same, but apparently not.

 

There was another typical report about vulnerable mothers in an English Council region being offered baby boxes which was apparently considered by the BBC to be a good thing, but they omitted any mention of the baby box scheme in Scotland which is available to all families. Weird, or what? It seems that baby boxes are a great idea everywhere except in Scotland where they are a waste of money as well as being a fire hazard when assaulted with a flamethrower.

 

BBC Scotland also managed the fine trick of turning a report about cold weather into an attack on the Scottish Government for not re-introducing the Winter Fuel Payments for pensioners this year. Talk about brass necks! As you’d expect from a propaganda outlet, there was no mention at all that it was the Labour Westminster Government which cut the payments in the first place. Still, #SNPBad.

 

Naturally, NHS Scotland came in for heavy criticism, most of it entirely unwarranted but stirred up by hateful Unionist MSPs. The UK media in Scotland love to tell us that our NHS is failing which must be a real motivator for the hard-working staff in our hospitals and health centres. However, on most measures, NHS Scotland is objectively the best-performing Health Service in the UK. That may not seem a very high bar, but when you consider the financial constraints imposed on the Scottish Government by Westminster, it’s pretty good. As an example, Keir Starmer has announced new targets for treatment of patients within 18 weeks, with the aim to improve the number within 12 months. Except that, as Prof Robertson pointed out, even if the English NHS meets this target, it will still lag behind NHS Scotland’s current performance figure. If NHS Scotland can achieve that on a limited budget, imagine what we could do if the Scottish Government had all the powers available in a normal country.

 

As ever, don’t fall for the media headlines. They are misleading you in the hope that you will reject the chance to become citizens of a normal country. On that point, even if the Scottish Government was as incompetent as portrayed, that would not alter the fact that independence is normal. If we were a normal country, we could elect another Government to replace an incompetent one. At the moment, our choice is restricted because of the constitutional question. The media will paint any drop in support for the SNP as a drop in support for independence. It is nothing of the sort, of course, but that won’t prevent them reporting it as such.

 

I’m fully aware that the Scottish Government has many faults. Which Government doesn’t? But I’m not going to fall for the blatant propaganda which passes for news in Scotland.

 

If you want to keep track of the facts, give Prof Robertson a follow on BlueSky, or check out his website at www.talkingupscotlandtwo.com